Recreating the Typeface

Reproducing the typeface used in the Dunlap Broadside presented a challenge unlike any other part of the project: the original type is no longer manufactured. Some printer's type made today for the reporduction of historic documents come close in style, but none is a perfect match for the letterforms John Dunlap's compositors set in 1776, and on a project devoted to faithful reproduction, "close" is not enough. To capture the typeface exactly, we designed our own digital font, using images of surviving original broadsides as the reference. Each distinct character — uppercase, lowercase, ligature, and punctuation mark — was enlarged from a high-resolution photograph of an extant copy, then carefully hand-drawn to produce a clean version of the letterform, free of the ink spread, paper texture, and printing irregularities that obscure the underlying shape. Those drawings were then traced in font-creation software, which fits mathematically specified curves to each outline and produces a precise digital glyph. Once the full character set was complete, composition software was used to set the text of the Declaration digitally, matching the line breaks, letter spacing, and page proportions of the original. The finished digital page is then transferred to metal through a photo-etching process: a magnesium plate coated with a photosensitive emulsion is exposed through a film of the typeset page, and the unexposed emulsion — and the metal beneath it — is chemically etched away, leaving a raised relief surface that can be inked and pressed exactly as Dunlap's handset type was on the night of July 4, 1776.